pambo's Full Review: Norman Lewis - Thirty Days to Better English
This book packs hundreds of tips, tests, examples, advice, and arguments into 409 pages designed to help anyone learn, relearn or improve their grammar, punctuation, usage and spelling. It’s terrific.
It works as a self-teaching tool by first outlining a question. For example, in Chapter 18, “why is the nominative pronoun required in the sentence, ‘Harvey is taller than I.’?'' The author then provides the solution, walking the reader through a explanation of clauses and conjunctions, followed by several examples designed to reinforce the lesson. Then he moves onto related matters before ending the chapter with a quiz.
A teacher looking for fresh material or a better explanation than some textbooks offer could also use this book to good effect. Quiz answers are listed in the back of the book.
If talk about nominative clauses makes you nervous, don’t worry. The book starts off gently, with the first chapter entitled What is grammar? The answer? Grammar is what you say.
What could be simpler than that? It then progresses through several troublesome words people often confuse, such as effect and affect, lie and lay, hung and hanged and so on.
Every now and then, the author takes a brief detour to cite the views of other grammar experts. If this doesn’t interest you, skip right over it. The value of his citation is that it reminds us that in English, many rules aren’t rules at all, that the language is changing or that even the experts disagree.
The book is also useful as a reference work. It’s quite easy to pick and choose a topic, look it up and get a quick answer.
I would recommend this book to students, job seekers wanting to brush up on skills before writing a letter, parents wanting to stay a step ahead of their children (“Mommy, what’s a subjunctive?”), or anyone else who just wants to learn a little more.
One caution: This book was written in 1948 and has been periodically updated. But some of the questions rely on old images or somewhat sexist language. When I used this book a few years ago to teach a journalism class, I simply substituted newer names for old, for example, a sentence about Marilyn Monroe became a sentence about Denzel Washington. It seemed only right. This is a minor problem with an otherwise outstanding publication.
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